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eMadrid I (2010-2013)

The eMadrid Network is a project funded by the Government of the Region of Madrid, which promotes research and development of technologies to support learning (Technology-Enhanced Learning). Coordinated by the University Carlos III of Madrid, it has as partners the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and UNED, having other universities and companies as associated entities.

CREASE

The success of communication and information technologies in higher education has promoted the use of virtual campus in educational institutions. Virtual campuses are complex web applications used by these institutions in order to make easier the relationships between users (students, teachers and support staff). Thus, the management and maintenance of these virtual campus make necessary to take into account several issues: support to different e-learning platforms, integration with the rest of university services, design of a hardware architecture able to support a large amount of concurrent users, use of efficient mechanisms for the storage and retrieval of information, design of an adecuate format for learning objects interoperability, support for the management of educational knowledge, support for a learning strategy, definition and evaluation of quality in virtual campuses, etc. These and other characteristics, make necessary a joint effort in the scientific community in order to answer the challenges that are derived from design, construction, deployment, use and maintenance of virtual campuses.

ENLACE

The diversity of knowledge, experience and resources (both real and virtual) that are available in an increasing number of scientific disciplines, together with the wide range of mobile electronic devices, software modelling, simulation and collaboration tools, and distributed and ubiquitous computational technologies, offer an enormous potential for the exploration of new ways to teach and learn.

This technology, seen in the context of current theories of situated cognition and learner centred education, offers possibilities for the design and realisation of collaborative learning activities in scenarios that extend the standard scholastic framework, not only in terms of their physical location but also the mthodology and the realism of the scientific context, the participants, and the temporal dimension of the work, moving the learning scope away from the school. This has a similar philosophy to what are called 'active museums' or exploratories, or environmental education centres which are typically located in wildlife parks or reserves, and have a similar educational framework. The idea here is to improve the learning process, focussing on the acquisition process via the practical development of a learner's own scientific research capabilities. However, it is very important to note that these explorative activities are connected to the day to day school curriculum, being established as a link that enables the students to integrate information.

From a computer science perspective, the use of agent technology for modelling and providing active support of activities in complex organizations, together with the utilization of the 'semantic Web' to organize and structure shared knowledge and distributed resources, represent the technological baseline needed to achieve the objective of the present project: the modelling and design of open enviroments with intelligent communitiy learning support where the learning strategies, the collaboration mechanisms and the tools available, offer additional functionality to different work enviroments, experimental scenarios, and formal levels of social organization: individual, small groups, large groups, and communities. A fundamental part of this investigation is the generation of a semantic portal for learning communities in the area of enviromental education, using a participative design methodology and formative evaluation to verify the viability of the proposal. Specifically, to analyse and modify the functionality necessary to articulate the notion of 'community' (made up of both real and artificial agents) from different perspectives: the scholastic world, the scientific world, the professional world, and the society. In order to this, collaboration is planned with experts from different organizations with a long history of enviromental education, for example, both primary and secondary education.

KALEIDOSCOPE

Kaleidoscope is a Network of Excellence which brings together European teams in technology-enhanced learning.

Its goal is to integrate 76 research units from around Europe, covering a large range of expertise from technology to education, from academic to private research. Altogether, it is a community of more than 800 researchers in 23 countries which have joined in their efforts to develop new concepts and methods for exploring the future of learning with digital technologies.

Reference: Contract 507838

Founded by: European Community under the Sixth European Union Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, thematic priority Information Society Technologies.

COLDEX

COLDEX aims at developing and using new IT approaches and computational tools to foster scientific experimentation, modelling and simulation in distributed collaborative settings in an inter-cultural (European-Latin American) community of learners. Our efforts will result in the creation of innovative pedagogical scenarios. A common denominator for the learning domain is the study of visual and other perceptual phenomena, including astronomical and seismic measurements, from both a scientific and a subjective experiential perspective. The project will start with local learning communities sharing a rich everyday context. The target groups will range from higher secondary education to academic beginners. Computer-mediated collaboration tools will contribute to forming integrated synchronous/asynchronous access to a "group memory" on different levels. Our group is involved on the development of a Learning Object Repository (LOR) will be set up. All registered users will have access to the LOR. The added value here stems from a set of extended metadata which enables reuse, retrieval, and heuristic filtering. The COLDEX-specific metadata projects on standards like LOM to allow reuse in other contexts. We are also envolved on creating local and remote scenarios about Chemistry.